Ducks, Ballplayers OK, but Will Same Be True of A.C.?

She’s wedged between the side of a large blue water dispenser, which is also her pillow, and an empty bike rack. Late at night, it’s hard to know she’s even on the concrete. Her bicycle, loaded down with her few belongings, forms a wall to block the wind. Green eyes are about all you can see above her tattered blankets and beneath the cap pulled down deep onto her head.

But then, A.C. doesn’t care to be seen anyway.

In the eight years my family has lived in the Disneyland area, we’ve done our grocery shopping at a nearby Ralphs in Garden Grove. For all those years, as best I can remember, A.C. has lived outside Ralphs door.

I never knew that was her name. She’d never once asked me, or anyone else, I’m told, for money. Our only contact had been once last year when I had my young daughter on the 25-cent horse ride outside the door. A.C. moved closer to watch, to take pleasure from a child’s joy.

But last week I asked her name, and more.

“How long have you been sleeping here?”

“How long has Ralphs been here?” was her response.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I was here before Ralphs. I watched ‘em build it.”

We’ve talked several times now. But A.C.--a guess is she’s in her late 60s or early 70s--will not reveal to me her last name, or what goes with those initials. She did finally say she has relatives in the Southland but doesn’t communicate with them.

“Too many terrorists in California,” she says. “It’s not safe for me to have contact with any relatives right now.”

Answers like that made me think A.C. was not only homeless but suffering mental illness. (Some who work in the shopping complex call her “the Screamer,” because on occasion she loses verbal control without provocation.) But other statements from A.C. seemed remarkable, given her circumstances.

“What about the ducks?” she asks. “Are the ducks OK?”

I finally realized she was talking about the draining of the lake at the nearby Garden Grove Civic Center. A lot of people had worried about those ducks. I assured her they were fine.

“What about the ballplayers?” she asked. It took awhile to straighten out that she meant the Angels. The last she’d read--and she does read newspapers that she finds--owner Gene Autry was threatening to move the team somewhere else. Angels all OK, I said.

Did she have a son or a daughter whom someone might try to contact for her? What future did she once see for herself? Did she know about local shelters that might give her temporary relief from the hard concrete?

When I asked if she’d been married, she said, “This is California. Hasn’t everybody here been married one time or another?”

She’s mum about children. But in one conversation she did say that she once dreamed of being an artist. She has used shelters in the past, she says, but her bicycle isn’t operable, so she can’t get around to them. Besides, she doesn’t like to stray too far from Ralphs.

“I really don’t like an unfamiliar environment,” she says.

She gets by, because some people do approach her to offer money, which she spends in the grocery store. There’s a Laundromat in the complex, and people give her change to wash her clothes. When I explained I could help her get government assistance that she was entitled to by law, she shook her head: “The bankers would take it away from me.”

I wish some philanthropist or some agency would just whoosh her up, take her someplace where she can feel the comfort of a feathered pillow and a warm bed. But before long, chances are, A.C. would be back at Ralphs anyway. Back home in familiar territory.

Outreach Is Out: It turns out there was such a county group, to do that very thing--they’d take calls from people like me, then send someone to a specific homeless person to help him or her.

But that outreach team got blindsided--by Orange County’s bankruptcy.

“When the bankruptcy hit, that was the end of them,” says Tim Shaw, executive director of the county’s Homeless Issues Task Force. “It’s really too bad; they played an important role.”

Shaw estimates that there are 15,000 homeless people in Orange County, and says elderly homeless women have it roughest of all. Only 30 shelter beds in the entire county are specifically earmarked for them, and only 40 other beds are for the mentally ill of both genders.

“Also, homeless women, even the elderly, face the danger of sexual assault,” he says. “They live on the streets, but the streets aren’t really safe for them.”

Help Not Wanted? A generous psychologist in Newport Beach, Rebecca Folsom, has offered to talk to A.C., to see what she can do. Folsom works with Human Options, which provides temporary housing to women, and also has helped numerous homeless people on her own.

But Folsom warns not to expect too much.

“You think you’re trying to help, they think you want to put them in jail,” she explains. “The system has let them down so many times, they no longer trust anyone.”

Kathi Winter, who publishes a local newsletter on the homeless called “Open Door,” has worked for years with a group that feeds homeless people in public parks, and tries to find work for some of them. She too is skeptical that much can be done.

“The first year that they’re on the street, maybe two, you can reach them,” she says. “But once they’ve been on the street five years or more, they build up a wall of resistance. They become resigned that this is life and just create a way to exist.”

Wrap-Up: I had this naive vision of a happy ending. That I’d find a long estranged daughter of A.C.’s and there would be this joyous reunion. Maybe grandchildren she’s never seen.

But good fortune is not a part of A.C.’s life. Today I’ll go on to another story; tonight A.C. will be back at Ralphs, sleeping propped against the water dispenser.

Unfortunately, we didn’t even get to be friends. A.C. has decided that I’m in with the terrorists. Or, worse in her eyes, the bankers.

Kathi Winter said something that hits hard: “What’s really sad is, she will probably die on the streets.”

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or sending a fax to (714) 966-7711.